Info for Prospective Students

Our department is of moderate size compared to other departments around the country and the ratio of physics majors to professors is about 3 to 1, which means there are excellent opportunities for undergraduates to pursue substantive research opportunities under the guidance of faculty mentors. It is not uncommon for our majors to start doing research in their freshman or sophomore year and then continue until they graduate.

There are a number of outstanding and unique features that make our department a particularly attractive academic home for undergraduates, including:

We have a very active chapter of the Society of Physics Students, which won recognition as a national outstanding chapter in 2016-2017. We also have a chapter of the physics honors society, Sigma Pi Sigma.

Beyond the third semester, our classroom sizes tend to be small ranging from 5-30 students. Almost all of our classes, including the introductory courses, are taught by professors or full-time lecturers.

We have an excellent undergraduate lounge for our majors, which serves as a gathering place where students can study and work with their peers on assignments.

We have an open and collaborative environment for undergraduate research in our department. Many of our majors seek out and find research opportunities with faculty in our department, some starting as early as their freshman year. And these students are not just given busy work; many are put on projects that are important to the research goals of that lab and end up being an author on one or more publications before they graduate. During the years 2015-2018, we had 9 undergraduates as co-authors on refereed journal publications.

Many of our students have the opportunity to serve as Undergraduate Teaching Assistants, providing support in our introductory physics courses. Student can earn course credit for this work.

The STEPUP program – Searching for Transiting Exo-Planets at the University of Pittsburgh – is entirely run by undergraduates. This group uses a telescope at Allegheny Observatory to make nightly observations of stars identified by NASA’s Kepler Satellite as possible hosts of transiting planet systems. The students search for as-yet undiscovered planets around distant stars. Students from this group have co-authored two refereed papers based on their observations.